A family of primitive

monotrysia The Monotrysia are a group of moths in the lepidopteran order, not currently considered to be a natural group or clade. Apart from the recently discovered family Andesianidae, most of the group consists of small, relatively understudied species ...

n moths in the order

Lepidoptera Lepidoptera ( ) is an order (biology), order of insects that includes butterfly, butterflies and moths (both are called lepidopterans). About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera are described, in 126 Family (biology), families and 46 Taxonomic r ...

, Heliozelidae are small, metallic day-flying moths with shiny smooth heads. In Europe the small adult moths (genera ''Antispila'' and ''Heliozela'') are seldom noticed as they fly quite early in the spring. The larvae are

leaf mine A leaf miner is any one of numerous species of insects in which the larval stage lives in, and eats, the leaf tissue of plants. The vast majority of leaf-mining insects are moths ( Lepidoptera), sawflies ( Symphyta, the mother clade of wasp ...

rs and the vacated leaf mines are distinctive because the

larva A larva (; plural larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle. The ...

leaves a large hole at the end. The family is worldwide but the recently discovered genus ''Plesiozela'' from southern

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...

(which has five segments in the labial palps) may represent the

sister group In phylogenetics, a sister group or sister taxon, also called an adelphotaxon, comprises the closest relative(s) of another given unit in an evolutionary tree. Definition The expression is most easily illustrated by a cladogram: Taxon A and t ...

of living heliozelids (Karsholt and Kristensen, 2003).

References

*Davis, D.R. (1999). The Monotrysian Heteroneura. Ch. 6, pp. 65–90 in Kristensen, N.P. (Ed.). ''Lepidoptera, Moths and Butterflies''. Volume 1: Evolution, Systematics, and Biogeography. Handbuch der Zoologie. Eine Naturgeschichte der Stämme des Tierreiches / Handbook of Zoology. A Natural History of the phyla of the Animal Kingdom. Band / Volume IV Arthropoda: Insecta Teilband / Part 35: 491 pp. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York. *Heppner, J. B. (1984). Heliozelidae. Pages 18–19 in Atlas of Neotropical Lepidoptera. 2. Checklist. pt. 1, Micropterigoidea-Immoidea. J. B. Heppner, ed. W. Junk, The Hague, Boston. *Karsholt, O. and N. P. Kristensen. 2003. ''Plesiozela'', gen. nov. from temperate South America: apparent sister-group of the previously known Heliozelidae (Lepidoptera: Incurvarioidea: Heliozelidae). ''Invertebrate Systematics'', 17(1): 39-46.

External links

Tree of Life

HeliozelidaeUK species
Moth families Taxa named by Hermann von Heinemann Taxa named by Maximilian Ferdinand Wocke {{Heliozelidae-stub